The Next Draft: Local head brewers reflect on homebrewing roots

Wednesday

At his Sturbridge brewery, Bob Bixby has never turned down a sample from a homebrewer.

Indeed, Bixby, co-founder and head brewer of Altruist Brewing Co., offers his discerning palate free of charge. He’ll also take questions and dole out bags of malt.

In his own small way, Bixby is honoring his homebrewing roots. “I come from a homebrewing background, so if a homebrewer has a question or needs malt, I’ll help them out.”

Long before opening Altruist last year, he tinkered away in his garage with a jury-rigged homebrew system, giving samples to neighbors in his cul-de-sac. And when Bixby visited breweries as a homebrewer, he hoped to find head brewers willing to answer questions.

“It drove me crazy when brewers were unwilling to talk about their systems, and when I didn’t get a warm response, I was turned off,” he said.

Like Bixby, most former homebrewers who’ve moved onto commercial brewing embrace opportunities to share the knowledge they’ve gained along the way.

They started with lobster pots and malt extract, reading Charlie Papazian’s quintessential guide to homebrewing, “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.” Eventually, they discovered how much easier it is to keg a batch than to bottle it and graduated to using grains and hops.

Ben Roesch, brewmaster at Wormtown Brewery in Worcester, began homebrewing in off-campus housing while still an undergrad at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The options for craft beer were growing then, and Roesch felt inspired by new beers he’d tasted.

“Being in college, having that thirst for knowledge, I wanted to know what made these new beers different from your typical beer,” he said. “I wanted to figure out what made one style different from another.”

After college, Roesch worked at a homebrew shop in West Boylston, and he became someone whom new homebrewers could turn to for questions. At home, he was experimenting with different fermentable sugars, such as maple syrup.

“That was the period of time where I was really enjoying brewing, but kind of bemoaning that when the time came to choose something you wanted to do in life, brewing was not really an option,” he said. “When you’re a 17-year-old kid in high school, no guidance counselor is asking if you’re interested in a career in making alcohol.”

In the early '90s, after a steady diet of American lagers, Maureen Fabry discovered craft beer. From there, it did not take long for her to wander into her local homebrew shop. Now Fabry is head brewer and co-owner of Milford’s CraftRoots Brewing, which opened in 2015.

“Tasting some of those new flavors, you wondered, ‘How did these get into the beer?’ ” Fabry said. “The experience of understanding what fermentation was, the ingredients involved and the physical process of making something tangible coalesced for me. It all came together in this thing called brewing.”

Homebrewing soon evolved into more than a hobby for Fabry. In her early 30s at the time, she was disenchanted with her career in academics and searching for something new. For her, the pivotal first step toward a job in craft beer was enrolling in an apprenticeship program at the American Brewers Guild.

“I figured there were not a lot of women who were brewers, so I thought I should get some credentials if I wanted to have a go at it,” Fabry said. “And being in that formal brew program helped me fall in love with brewing even more.”

Isolated in rural Maine, Jeremy Spearin found homebrewing through a mad-scientist approach to fermentation. “I was making a lot of mead and blackberry wine, messing around with every aspect of fermentation, even sauerkraut and kombucha,” said Spearin, who took over as head brewer at Cold Harbor Brewing Co. in Westboro last year.

Homebrewing taught Spearin ingenuity; working on his own patchwork system, he’d often have to cobble together new parts or work around problems. “Part of the fun was taking what you have and making it work for you,” he said.

Fabry said homebrewing left her with a steadfast commitment to seeing things through, an attitude that helped her in opening CraftRoots.

“Once you start a batch of beer, you’ve made a commitment to finishing that batch of beer; you can’t get the mash in then decide to do something else,” she said. “Sometimes things break in the process of homebrewing, but at some point, you have to do whatever it takes to push on. It’s that kind of gritty aspect of homebrewing that is a really good thing to take into opening your own brewery.”

Roesch brought the creativity he honed as a homebrewer — experimenting with different ingredients — with him when he helped open Wormtown in 2010.

“The lack of restrictions in homebrewing really allow brewers to create things without boundaries, and some of those things you can come up with, you bring to the commercial scale.”

At Altruist, Bixby has been amazed by the skill of some of the homebrewers he meets. Homebrewers today have access to more sources for information, ingredients and equipment than he did, he said.

“Now, you can buy malts and hops and equipment, and two days later it shows up at your door; it’s so much better than it used to be because of the quality of ingredients and access to knowledge.”

But none of this has made Bixby want to homebrew again.

“There’s just no time for it,” he said.

This week, Wormtown released a companion beer to its flagship American IPA Be Hoppy: It’s aptly titled “Don’t Worry.”

Don’t Worry is Wormtown’s take on the popular New England IPA, but with some differences. “It doesn’t have that reduced bitterness, and it’s not super hazy; we were able to use some new hops that we haven’t used before,” said brewmaster Roesch.

Don’t Worry is in wide distribution and on tap in Wormtown’s Shrewsbury Street taproom.